Location-Aware Services Using Android Mobile Operating Platform for Safety, Emergency and Health Applications

Abstract

The introduction of smart phones has redefined the usage of mobile phones in the communications world. Smart phones are now equipped with various sophisticated features such as Wi-Fi, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation capability, high-resolution camera, touch screen, and broadband access which helps the mobile phone users to stay connected and updated. Many of these features are primarily integrated with the mobile operating system and are out of reach of the public; that is the users can not manipulate these features. However, this situation has changed with the advent of an innovative, user friendly and versatile operating system known as “Android”. It was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, an open source initiative piloted by Google. The open system architecture with customizable third party development and debugging environment features help the users to manipulate the features and create their own customizable applications.

In this chapter, we propose a location-aware remote system using Google’s Andriod mobile platform for safety, emergency and health scenarios and develop an Andriod application for this purpose. Emergency is divided into three categories; heart abnormalities, security threats, and road accidents. The first scenario we investigated is targeted towards heart abnormalities monitoring. The heart rate monitoring device is integrated with the proposed application to measure the heart rate of a user driving a vehicle, and if abnormalities are detected the application performs a dual role. The application uses GPS to track the location information of the user and sends this information via SMS, email and posts it on the user’s Facebook wall. Simultaneously, an emergency signal is sent to an Arduino microcontroller which will in turn trigger an alarm in the vehicle to notify the emergency situation. The second scenario is targeted towards road accidents. The proposed application is designed to detect that an accident has occurred using the sensors in the Andriod mobile phone and, consequently, an action is taken by the application to notify the emergency services that an accident has occurred and its location. Finally, the third scenario we investigated is security threats which can occur anywhere and the proposed application can also offer assistance in personal safety situations. In this case, the user interacts with the application by pressing a designated button and the application will automatically calculate the geographical information and send the location information via SMS and email to a pre-stored emergency contact, and also post the information on the user’s Facebook wall.